OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Frugal and Truthful Auctions for Vertex Covers, Flows, and Cuts
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2011
Year: 2011

We study truthful mechanisms for hiring a team of agents in three classes of set systems: Vertex Cover auctions, k-flow auctions, and cut auctions. For Vertex Cover auctions, the vertices are owned by selfish and rational agents, and the auctioneer wants to purchase a vertex cover from them. For k-flow auctions, the edges are owned by the agents, and the auctioneer wants to purchase k edge-disjoint s-t paths, for given s and t. In the same setting, for cut auctions, the auctioneer wants to purchase an s-t cut. Only the agents know their costs, and the auctioneer needs to select a feasible set and payments based on bids made by the agents. We present constant-competitive truthful mechanisms for all three set systems. That is, the maximum overpayment of the mechanism is within a constant factor of the maximum overpayment of any truthful mechanism, for every set system in the class. The mechanism for Vertex Cover is based on scaling each bid by a multiplier derived from the dominant eigenvector of a certain matrix. The mechanism for k-flows prunes the graph to be minimally (k+1)-connected, and then applies the Vertex Cover mechanism. Similarly, the mechanism for cuts contracts the graph until all s-t paths have length exactly 2, and then applies the Vertex Cover mechanism.
Secret Key Agreement from Correlated Gaussian Sources by Rate Limited Public Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

We investigate the secret key agreement from correlated Gaussian sources in which the legitimate parties can use the public communication with limited rate. For the class of protocols with the one-way public communication, we show a closed form expression of the optimal trade-off between the rate of key generation and the rate of the public communication. Our results clarify an essential difference between the key agreement from discrete sources and that from continuous sources.
Architecture for communication with a fidelity criterion in unknown networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

We prove that in order to communicate independent sources (this is the unicast problem) between various users over an unknown medium to within various distortion levels, it is sufficient to consider source-channel separation based architectures: architectures which first compress the sources to within the corresponding distortion levels followed by reliable communication over the unknown medium. We are reducing the problem of universal rate-distortion communication of independent sources over a network to the universal reliable communication problem over networks. This is a reductionist view. We are not solving the reliable communication problem in networks.
Minimizing weighted sum download time for one-to-many file transfer in peer-to-peer networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

This paper considers the problem of transferring a file from one source node to multiple receivers in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum download time (WSDT) for the one-to-many file transfer. Previous work has shown that, given an order at which the receivers finish downloading, the minimum WSD can be solved in polynomial time by convex optimization, and can be achieved by linear network coding, assuming that node uplinks are the only bottleneck in the network. This paper, however, considers heterogeneous peers with both uplink and downlink bandwidth constraints specified. The static scenario is a file-transfer scheme in which the network resource allocation remains static until all receivers finish downloading. This paper first shows that the static scenario may be optimized in polynomial time by convex optimization, and the associated optimal static WSD can be achieved by linear network coding. This paper then presented a lower bound to the minimum WSDT that is easily computed and turns out to be tight across a wide range of parameterizations of the problem. This paper also proposes a static routing-based scheme and a static rateless-coding-based scheme which have almost-optimal empirical performances. The dynamic scenario is a file-transfer scheme which can re-allocate the network resource during the file transfer. This paper proposes a dynamic rateless-coding-based scheme, which provides significantly smaller WSDT than the optimal static scenario does.
Polyominoes Simulating Arbitrary-Neighborhood Zippers and Tilings
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2011
Year: 2011

This paper provides a bridge between the classical tiling theory and the complex neighborhood self-assembling situations that exist in practice. The neighborhood of a position in the plane is the set of coordinates which are considered adjacent to it. This includes classical neighborhoods of size four, as well as arbitrarily complex neighborhoods. A generalized tile system consists of a set of tiles, a neighborhood, and a relation which dictates which are the "admissible" neighboring tiles of a given tile. Thus, in correctly formed assemblies, tiles are assigned positions of the plane in accordance to this relation. We prove that any validly tiled path defined in a given but arbitrary neighborhood (a zipper) can be simulated by a simple "ribbon" of microtiles. A ribbon is a special kind of polyomino, consisting of a non-self-crossing sequence of tiles on the plane, in which successive tiles stick along their adjacent edge. Finally, we extend this construction to the case of traditional tilings, proving that we can simulate arbitrary-neighborhood tilings by simple-neighborhood tilings, while preserving some of their essential properties.
Required Behavior of Sequence Diagrams: Semantics and Conformance
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2011
Year: 2011

Sequence diagrams are a widely used design notation for describing software behaviors. Many reusable software artifacts such as design patterns and design aspects make use of sequence diagrams to describe interaction behaviors. When a pattern or an aspect is reused in an application, it is important to ensure that the sequence diagrams for the application conform to the corresponding sequence diagrams for the pattern or aspect. Reasoning about conformance relationship between sequence diagrams has not been addressed adequately in literature. In this paper, we focus on required behavior specified by a UML sequence diagram. A novel trace semantics is given that captures precisely required behavior specified by a sequence diagram and a conformance relation between sequence diagrams is formalized based on the semantics. Properties of the trace semantics and the conformance relation are studied.
Bit Allocation Laws for Multi-Antenna Channel Feedback Quantization: Multi-User Case
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

This paper addresses the optimal design of limited-feedback downlink multi-user spatial multiplexing systems. A multiple-antenna base-station is assumed to serve multiple single-antenna users, who quantize and feed back their channel state information (CSI) through a shared rate-limited feedback channel. The optimization problem is cast in the form of minimizing the average transmission power at the base-station subject to users' target signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINR) and outage probability constraints. The goal is to derive the feedback bit allocations among the users and the corresponding channel magnitude and direction quantization codebooks in a high-resolution quantization regime. Toward this end, this paper develops an optimization framework using approximate analytical closed-form solutions, the accuracy of which is then verified by numerical results. The results show that, for channels in the real space, the number of channel direction quantization bits should be $(M-1)$ times the number of channel magnitude quantization bits, where $M$ is the number of base-station antennas. Moreover, users with higher requested quality-of-service (QoS), i.e. lower target outage probabilities, and higher requested downlink rates, i.e. higher target SINR's, should use larger shares of the feedback rate. It is also shown that, for the target QoS parameters to be feasible, the total feedback bandwidth should scale logarithmically with the geometric mean of the target SINR values and the geometric mean of the inverse target outage probabilities. In particular, the minimum required feedback rate is shown to increase if the users' target parameters deviate from the corresponding geometric means. Finally, the paper shows that, as the total number of feedback bits $B$ increases, the performance of the limited-feedback system approaches the perfect-CSI system as ${2^{-{B}/{M^2}}}$.
Truth and Envy in Capacitated Allocation Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2011
Year: 2011

We study auctions with additive valuations where agents have a limit on the number of goods they may receive. We refer to such valuations as {\em capacitated} and seek mechanisms that maximize social welfare and are simultaneously incentive compatible, envy-free, individually rational, and have no positive transfers. If capacities are infinite, then sequentially repeating the 2nd price Vickrey auction meets these requirements. In 1983, Leonard showed that for unit capacities, VCG with Clarke Pivot payments is also envy free. For capacities that are all unit or all infinite, the mechanism produces a Walrasian pricing (subject to capacity constraints). Here, we consider general capacities. For homogeneous capacities (all capacities equal) we show that VCG with Clarke Pivot payments is envy free (VCG with Clarke Pivot payments is always incentive compatible, individually rational, and has no positive transfers). Contrariwise, there is no incentive compatible Walrasian pricing. For heterogeneous capacities, we show that there is no mechanism with all 4 properties, but at least in some cases, one can achieve both incentive compatibility and envy freeness.
EphPub: Toward Robust Ephemeral Publishing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2011
Year: 2011

The increasing amount of personal and sensitive information disseminated over the Internet prompts commensurately growing privacy concerns. Digital data often lingers indefinitely and users lose its control. This motivates the desire to restrict content availability to an expiration time set by the data owner. This paper presents and formalizes the notion of Ephemeral Publishing (EphPub), to prevent the access to expired content. We propose an efficient and robust protocol that builds on the Domain Name System (DNS) and its caching mechanism. With EphPub, sensitive content is published encrypted and the key material is distributed, in a steganographic manner, to randomly selected and independent resolvers. The availability of content is then limited by the evanescence of DNS cache entries. The EphPub protocol is transparent to existing applications, and does not rely on trusted hardware, centralized servers, or user proactive actions. We analyze its robustness and show that it incurs a negligible overhead on the DNS infrastructure. We also perform a large-scale study of the caching behavior of 900K open DNS resolvers. Finally, we propose Firefox and Thunderbird extensions that provide ephemeral publishing capabilities, as well as a command-line tool to create ephemeral files.
Object-image correspondence for curves under finite and affine cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2011
Year: 2011

We provide criteria for deciding whether a given planar curve is an image of a given spatial curve, obtained by a central or a parallel projection with unknown parameters. These criteria reduce the projection problem to a certain modification of the equivalence problem of planar curves under affine and projective transformations. The latter problem can be addressed using Cartan's moving frame method. This leads to a novel algorithmic solution of the projection problem for curves. The computational advantage of the algorithms presented here, in comparison to algorithms based on a straightforward solution, lies in a significant reduction of a number of real parameters that has to be eliminated in order to establish existence or non-existence of a projection that maps a given spatial curve to a given planar curve. The same approach can be used to decide whether a given finite set of ordered points on a plane is an image of a given finite set of ordered points in R^3. The motivation comes from the problem of establishing a correspondence between an object and an image, taken by a camera with unknown position and parameters.
Cognitive Interference Management in Retransmission-Based Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

Cognitive radio methodologies have the potential to dramatically increase the throughput of wireless systems. Herein, control strategies which enable the superposition in time and frequency of primary and secondary user transmissions are explored in contrast to more traditional sensing approaches which only allow the secondary user to transmit when the primary user is idle. In this work, the optimal transmission policy for the secondary user when the primary user adopts a retransmission based error control scheme is investigated. The policy aims to maximize the secondary users' throughput, with a constraint on the throughput loss and failure probability of the primary user. Due to the constraint, the optimal policy is randomized, and determines how often the secondary user transmits according to the retransmission state of the packet being served by the primary user. The resulting optimal strategy of the secondary user is proven to have a unique structure. In particular, the optimal throughput is achieved by the secondary user by concentrating its transmission, and thus its interference to the primary user, in the first transmissions of a primary user packet. The rather simple framework considered in this paper highlights two fundamental aspects of cognitive networks that have not been covered so far: (i) the networking mechanisms implemented by the primary users (error control by means of retransmissions in the considered model) react to secondary users' activity; (ii) if networking mechanisms are considered, then their state must be taken into account when optimizing secondary users' strategy, i.e., a strategy based on a binary active/idle perception of the primary users' state is suboptimal.
Bargaining dynamics in exchange networks
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2011
Year: 2011

We consider a one-sided assignment market or exchange network with transferable utility and propose a model for the dynamics of bargaining in such a market. Our dynamical model is local, involving iterative updates of 'offers' based on estimated best alternative matches, in the spirit of pairwise Nash bargaining. We establish that when a balanced outcome (a generalization of the pairwise Nash bargaining solution to networks) exists, our dynamics converges rapidly to such an outcome. We extend our results to the cases of (i) general agent 'capacity constraints', i.e., an agent may be allowed to participate in multiple matches, and (ii) 'unequal bargaining powers' (where we also find a surprising change in rate of convergence).
Differential Privacy and the Fat-Shattering Dimension of Linear Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2011
Year: 2011

In this paper, we consider the task of answering linear queries under the constraint of differential privacy. This is a general and well-studied class of queries that captures other commonly studied classes, including predicate queries and histogram queries. We show that the accuracy to which a set of linear queries can be answered is closely related to its fat-shattering dimension, a property that characterizes the learnability of real-valued functions in the agnostic-learning setting.
Incidence structures from the blown-up plane and LDPC codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

In this article, new regular incidence structures are presented. They arise from sets of conics in the affine plane blown-up at its rational points. The LDPC codes given by these incidence matrices are studied. These sparse incidence matrices turn out to be redundant, which means that their number of rows exceeds their rank. Such a feature is absent from random LDPC codes and is in general interesting for the efficiency of iterative decoding. The performance of some codes under iterative decoding is tested. Some of them turn out to perform better than regular Gallager codes having similar rate and row weight.
Performance Analysis of Sparse Recovery Based on Constrained Minimal Singular Values
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

The stability of sparse signal reconstruction is investigated in this paper. We design efficient algorithms to verify the sufficient condition for unique $\ell_1$ sparse recovery. One of our algorithm produces comparable results with the state-of-the-art technique and performs orders of magnitude faster. We show that the $\ell_1$-constrained minimal singular value ($\ell_1$-CMSV) of the measurement matrix determines, in a very concise manner, the recovery performance of $\ell_1$-based algorithms such as the Basis Pursuit, the Dantzig selector, and the LASSO estimator. Compared with performance analysis involving the Restricted Isometry Constant, the arguments in this paper are much less complicated and provide more intuition on the stability of sparse signal recovery. We show also that, with high probability, the subgaussian ensemble generates measurement matrices with $\ell_1$-CMSVs bounded away from zero, as long as the number of measurements is relatively large. To compute the $\ell_1$-CMSV and its lower bound, we design two algorithms based on the interior point algorithm and the semi-definite relaxation.
Compressive MUSIC: A Missing Link Between Compressive Sensing and Array Signal Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

The multiple measurement vector (MMV) problem addresses the identification of unknown input vectors that share common sparse support. Even though MMV problems had been traditionally addressed within the context of sensor array signal processing, the recent trend is to apply compressive sensing (CS) due to its capability to estimate sparse support even with an insufficient number of snapshots, in which case classical array signal processing fails. However, CS guarantees the accurate recovery in a probabilistic manner, which often shows inferior performance in the regime where the traditional array signal processing approaches succeed. The apparent dichotomy between the {\em probabilistic} CS and {\em deterministic} sensor array signal processing have not been fully understood. The main contribution of the present article is a unified approach that unveils a {missing link} between CS and array signal processing. The new algorithm, which we call {\em compressive MUSIC}, identifies the parts of support using CS, after which the remaining supports are estimated using a novel generalized MUSIC criterion. Using a large system MMV model, we show that our compressive MUSIC requires a smaller number of sensor elements for accurate support recovery than the existing CS methods and can approach the optimal $l_0$-bound with finite number of snapshots.
Compiling Signal Processing Code embedded in Haskell via LLVM
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2011
Year: 2011

We discuss a programming language for real-time audio signal processing that is embedded in the functional language Haskell and uses the Low-Level Virtual Machine as back-end. With that framework we can code with the comfort and type safety of Haskell while achieving maximum efficiency of fast inner loops and full vectorisation. This way Haskell becomes a valuable alternative to special purpose signal processing languages.
Extremal graphs for the identifying code problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2011
Year: 2011

An identifying code of a graph G is a dominating set C such that every vertex x of G is distinguished from all other vertices by the set of vertices in C that are at distance at most 1 from x. The problem of finding an identifying code of minimum possible size turned out to be a challenging problem. It was proved by N. Bertrand that if a graph on n vertices with at least one edge admits an identifying code, then a minimum identifying code has size at most n-1. Some classes of graphs whose smallest identifying code is of size n-1 were already known, and few conjectures were formulated to classify all these graphs. In this paper, disproving these conjectures, we classify all finite graphs for which all but one of the vertices are needed to form an identifying code. We also classify all infinite graphs needing the whole set of vertices in any identifying code. New upper bounds in terms of the number of vertices and the maximum degree of a graph are also provided.
Chaotic iterations versus Spread-spectrum: chaos and stego security
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2011
Year: 2011

A new framework for information hiding security, called chaos-security, has been proposed in a previous study. It is based on the evaluation of unpredictability of the scheme, whereas existing notions of security, as stego-security, are more linked to information leaks. It has been proven that spread-spectrum techniques, a well-known stego-secure scheme, are chaos-secure too. In this paper, the links between the two notions of security is deepened and the usability of chaos-security is clarified, by presenting a novel data hiding scheme that is twice stego and chaos-secure. This last scheme has better scores than spread-spectrum when evaluating qualitative and quantitative chaos-security properties. Incidentally, this result shows that the new framework for security tends to improve the ability to compare data hiding scheme.
Realizability algebras: a program to well order R
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2011
Year: 2011

The theory of classical realizability is a framework in which we can develop the proof-program correspondence. Using this framework, we show how to transform into programs the proofs in classical analysis with dependent choice and the existence of a well ordering of the real line. The principal tools are: The notion of realizability algebra, which is a three-sorted variant of the well known combinatory algebra of Curry. An adaptation of the method of forcing used in set theory to prove consistency results. Here, it is used in another way, to obtain programs associated with a well ordering of R and the existence of a non trivial ultrafilter on N.
A Performance Comparison of CUDA and OpenCL
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2011
Year: 2011

CUDA and OpenCL are two different frameworks for GPU programming. OpenCL is an open standard that can be used to program CPUs, GPUs, and other devices from different vendors, while CUDA is specific to NVIDIA GPUs. Although OpenCL promises a portable language for GPU programming, its generality may entail a performance penalty. In this paper, we use complex, near-identical kernels from a Quantum Monte Carlo application to compare the performance of CUDA and OpenCL. We show that when using NVIDIA compiler tools, converting a CUDA kernel to an OpenCL kernel involves minimal modifications. Making such a kernel compile with ATI's build tools involves more modifications. Our performance tests measure and compare data transfer times to and from the GPU, kernel execution times, and end-to-end application execution times for both CUDA and OpenCL.
A remark about orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2011
Year: 2011

In this note, we investigate the theoretical properties of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), a class of decoder to recover sparse signal in compressed sensing. In particular, we show that the OMP decoder can give $(p,q)$ instance optimality for a large class of encoders with $1\leq p\leq q \leq 2$ and $(p,q)\neq (2,2)$. We also show that, if the encoding matrix is drawn from an appropriate distribution, then the OMP decoder is $(2,2)$ instance optimal in probability.